Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

8.2 Review of the HEAT 8 DISCUSSION
8.2.8 Additional functionalities
Some other interesting areas of research have been discovered during the practical
evaluation of the HEAT. Those areas will be introduced briefly, but are regarded
as out of scope for this PhD and should be addressed during future work.
First of all, it seems highly interesting to investigate how educational material
can be created automatically or semi-automatically from the material stored in the
content space. A first and simple approach could be to undertake the following
steps:
The author is supported by the HEAT in a first selection of useful educational
material from the content space. The author would have to specify some meta-
data about the material, for example subject domain and level of material. The
HEAT could then suggest material and possible linking structures for the creation
of a new EM. The information about the linking structures would also have to be
stored in the content space. This semi-automated authoring step would allow a
great reduction of the work for the author of new educational material.
Finally, an additional communication and session layer could be designed. Such
an additional layer could provide several opportunities for the teacher as well as
the students. For example, a session layer could store and manage the information
as to where a student was in an EM before he took a break.
However, this additional layer will need some extensive research work to be done
and will not have any influence on the EFTECS framework. It was therefore
considered as out of scope for this PhD.
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